Right Wing Nut House

LAST HURRAH FOR THE EXIT POLLS?

Joe Lenski of Edison Media research is on the hot seat. Less than 48 hours after the polls closed Lenski, who ran the exit polling operation for a consortium of big media, is being forced to defend the indefensible. How did he get it so wrong?

“No wrong projections [of winners] were made; the projections were spot on,” he said. “The members used this data with sophistication and understanding of what data can and cannot be used for.”

Yeah right. Lenski sounds like the designer of the Titanic trying to explain that even though a disaster happened, the ship was still unsinkable. Here were some exit polls posted by Sexette on the afternoon of November 2:

FL: 52/48 - KERRY
OH: 52/47 - KERRY
MI: 51/48 - KERRY
PA: 58/42 - KERRY
IA: 50/48 - KERRY
WI: 53/47 - KERRY
MN: 57/42 - KERRY
NH: 58/41 - KERRY
ME: 55/44 - KERRY

NV: 48/49 - BUSH
CO: 49/50 - BUSH
AR: 45/54 - BUSH
NC: 47/53 - BUSH

Actual vote totals can be found here.. They were close in NC, AR, NV, MI,and IA. By close, I mean within one percentage point of the eventual outcome.

But Kerry winning by 16 in PA? Up 15 in MN? Kerry by 17 in NH? These numbers aren’t just wrong, they’re numbers taken from some kind of weird parallel universe where bloggers don’t exist! How could they have gotten it so wrong?

The Washington Post blames the bloggers:

“Results based on the first few rounds of interviewing are usually only approximations of the final vote. Printouts warn that estimates of each candidate’s support are unreliable and not for on-air use. Those estimates are untrustworthy because people who vote earlier in the day tend to be different from those who vote in the middle of the day or the evening. For instance, the early national sample Tuesday that was 59 percent female probably reflected that more women vote in the day than the evening.”

The fact that someone leaked the numbers to some high volume blogs, including Drudge and Wonkette, proves to me that someone was trying to “game the system.” Dick Morris agrees:

“That an exit poll is always right is an axiom of politics. It is easier to assume that a compass is not pointing north than to assume that an exit poll is incorrect. It takes a deliberate act of fraud and bias to get an exit poll wrong. Since the variables of whether or not a person will actually vote are eliminated in exit polling, it is like peeking at the answer before taking the test.”

Morris speculated on O’Reilly last night that perhaps a Democratic operative had gotten a hold of where the exit pollsters were going to be stationed and “flooded” those precincts with pro-Kerry voters to skew the results, dishearten Republican voters, and tip the battleground states to Kerry.

I find that a little hard to believe because the sampling was too large (more than 12,000) and such a project would involve an enormous amount of coordination. A more likely explanation according to the Post:

“That is why the early leaks anger Lenski. “The basic issue here is the leaking of this information without any sophisticated understanding or analysis, in a way that makes it look inaccurate,” he said.

After the survey is completed and the votes are counted, the exit poll results are adjusted to reflect the actual vote, which in theory improves the accuracy of all the exit poll results, including the breakdown of the vote by age, gender and other characteristics.”

Clearly, lefty blogs ran with these early numbers because they WANTED them to be true. Right wing blogs ran with them pointing out the bogus nature of the sampling (59% women) and, more importantly URGING REPUBLICANS TO IGNORE THEM AND VOTE ANYWAY!

If this episode shows anything, it’s that you can’t “game” the blogosphere…not when you have literally thousands of individuals ready to add a corrective to any attempt to do so.

UPDATE:

Our dearly restored Commissar agrees that, if the exit polls favor one side or another, leaks will be inevitable. Somehow, it was so very satisfying to watch as the returns started coming in, Kos & Co. begin to melt like the Wicked Witch of the West when Dorothy threw water on her. Here’s Kos in all his glory after Fox called OH for Bush:

“The more I think about it, the more pissed off I am that the networks are calling Ohio when the state is still clearly undecided.
The odds may be slight, but this is Democracy. Let the fucking votes be counted.

But there is no reason to do so when the outcome is still so clearly in doubt.”

UPDATE:

The Bear has some interesting thoughts:

“Could somebody explain to me why, when the exit polls couldn’t accurately predict a simple question like “will Kerry or Bush win”, we should believe them when they say “Although seven in 10 voters were worried about another major attack on U.S. soil, a majority nonetheless felt the nation was safer than four years ago”?”

UPDATE:

The Capn’ weighs in:

“Not that I carry any water for the idea of exit polling — lately, we’ve had two elections where the exit polling impacted election coverage negatively, and some might argue actual voting as well. Exit polling has never been terribly predictive, as pollster Pat Caddell explained on Fox News this afternoon. It can give interesting demographic information about the vote after it’s complete, but as a predictive model, it’s a disaster.”

I wholeheartedly agree with the Captain’s assessment. I think one reason pollsters-both exit and national-are getting it so wrong lately is that the American public has become so sophistiacted about them, that they feel no compunction about telling pollsters what they think they WANT to hear rather than what they really think. Pollsters swear they factor such variables into their calulations but I don’t buy it. Especially this time around where there was an actual stigma attached to people (especially in heavily blue states) if they supported Bush.

The best polls seem to be those that asks the demographic questions FIRST and at the last ask the candidate preference question.

Can the polls be made more accurate? Given the market forces at work in the polling industry, I have absolutely no doubt they’ll get better.